NEW YORK, NY – Overseeing a criminal case against tornado cash developer Rome Storm said Tuesday that she will discuss another related case in the storm’s upcoming trial, Van Lorne and the Treasury’s verdict.
Magistrate Katherine Polk Failla said at a hearing in Manhattan: “The word ‘van loon’ will not appear in this trial.”
Hearing – the last face-to-face meeting before the Storm trial on June 14 – focused mainly on Limine’s motion (A pretrial motion that excludes certain evidence or arguments, in which case, proves the testimony to a large extent, is allowed during the trial) from prosecutors and the storm’s defense team. After hearing discussions between the two sides, Failla decided to rule on some of Limine’s motions Tuesday afternoon and during a conference call later this week.
Although the judge has not yet determined the issue of allowing witnesses to testify during the storm trial, she firmly decided to rule out testimony in the Fanlong case, which is related to the Ministry of Finance’s Foreign Assets Control Office (OFAC) The ability to approve tornado cash. After years of back and forth, OFAC has carefully selected Tornado Cash in March. A federal judge in Texas then found that OFAC sanctions on tornado cash were illegal, Disable it from restarting the privacy tool in the future.
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Failla said her thoughts have not yet been made up for whether to allow either party to discuss OFAC’s sanctions against Tornado Cash, expressing concerns that it would confuse the jury.
Storm’s lawyers told the court they hope sanctions will be excluded from witness testimony and ending debates during the trial, but prosecutors said it was difficult to browse important evidence, such as Storm’s alleged behavior. (Including certain Google searches, selling $12 million worth of tear tokens, and controlling tornado cash to a decentralized entity) The sanctions themselves were not discussed after OFAC initially approved the tornado cash.
Although not made in a formal ruling, Farah urged defense and prosecution to limit their mention of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. A key part of the government’s argument is that tornado cash has facilitated money laundering by the North Korean state-sanctioned hacker group Lazarus Group.
The trial was originally scheduled to begin in Manhattan on July 14, but is now expected to take a full two months.
